Bigotry and populism on the part of political opportunists like Cory Berdardi is the problem.

What Bernardi has done, indeed, what Bernardi seems to always do, is postulate a superiority position for him, his beliefs and those who think alike, over those who fail to conform. Single dimensional thought. “I’m right, you’re wrong”. It’s plainly clear that regardless of what Abbott’s unspoken thoughts might be on the subject, Bernardi has succeeded yet again to frighten the shit out of his fellow conservatives.

Indeed, I don’t believe Bernardi & his kind, the likes of Bolt, Akerman, Mathias Corman et al, to be ‘conservative’. True conservatives don’t attack religion. Conservatism takes many, many forms which is where the cop out of the Liberal Party being a ‘broad church’ comes from. Liberalism and conservatism are not inter-twined ideologies. They may be parallel, but never intersecting. Bernardi and his ilk fall broadly into the ‘Social Conservative’ cadre. Prudish, narrow-minded on matters of social change, rejecting of science in advancement of the human condition and intolerant of opinions and ideas which don’t conform to the social conservative ethos.

Forty years ago, social conservatives reviled the acceptance of Vietnamese boat people, as they fled repression in their homeland, by the Liberal Fraser government. What Fraser did was risky, but necessary. As a genuine Liberal in the Menzies vein, Fraser took the right path in direction contravention to opinions of many in his own party and a great swathe of the Australian demographic who continued to believe in a White Australia. My own parents fell into that demographic. White-skinned, anglo-celtic, christian Australians of white-skinned, anglo-celtic christan parents. Citizens fleeing Vietnam represented the dreaded ‘Yellow Peril’ that men had died to keep out of Australia forty years prior, or at least that’s what they believed.

Bernardi and his ilk are following precisely the same lines, save for the fact that oriental immigration has become common place now, with the passage of time. Let me make one point perfectly clear. It is my ardent contention that multiculturalism DOES NOT WORK. Has never worked and will never work as long as this generational throwback to White Australia persists in our society. Multiculturalism is a wonderful ideal, but the average Australian simply cannot grasp the concept, and a great many have no intention of trying to. Cory Bernardi and his ilk personify this generational throwback. They, as conservatives, fear change and demand it’s expulsion so that life as they require it might continue on undisturbed and undisturbing to them. What conservatism never takes into account is that by it’s very nature, the human condition is dynamic. The human condition IS change, in and of itself. We are change, we create change. We are our own difference as social creatures we cannot escape our own need for community. Integration is an inevitability, as it has been down the millenia. It’s why we all carry Neanderthal DNA – some of us more so than others in the case of Cory Bernardi. Thankfully however, like Neanderthal, social conservatives are relatively few, out-numbered by rationalism and socially responsible attitudes as opposed to those selfish, limited, arrogant attitudes of conservative fear mongers.